Smitten - Lauren Rowe Page 0,46
pan the camera down to give her an up-close view. “Those are the three goats of 22 Goats. All three of us got the exact same ink one drunken night. On Colin’s twenty-first birthday, actually.”
“Those are goats?” she blurts incredulously.
“They look more like haystacks, don’t they?”
“Or maybe piles of poop?”
I laugh. “Yeah. When we woke up the next morning and saw the atrocity on our bodies, Colin immediately wanted to get his covered with something else. But I said, ‘No this shit is so bad, it’s cool! It stays!’ Dax agreed with me, so Colin was outvoted.”
She shakes her head. “You must have been awfully drunk to put that on your bodies.”
“Oh, we were. And very poor.” I quickly tell her the whole story, which, in a nutshell, is that Colin, Dax and I got our hideous tattoos, courtesy of an aspiring tattoo artist we’d met at a party—some random guy we’d never met before who’d recently purchased a tattoo gun and promised free ink in exchange for the chance to practice. But the minute I’m done with my story, I steer our conversation back to the sexy videos we’ve both just captured.
“So, hey . . . How often do you think you’ll use that video of me in my underwear? You know, ‘on lonely nights?’”
She arches an eyebrow. “Every. Single. Time.”
Whoa. She looked damned hot saying that. I’ll give her that. But, unfortunately, she didn’t answer my question. Or at least, not the one I’d intended to ask.
“What about you?” she says flirtatiously. “How often do you think you’ll make use of the video you shot of me?”
Here we go. “Every single day. Probably, twice a day. Morning and night.” I chuckle at her shocked expression. “You look surprised.”
“No. Well, yes. A little. I was just thinking how much time that must take. Twice a day? I wouldn’t get anything else accomplished!”
My eyebrows involuntarily ride up at her implication, and she cringes in response.
“I just embarrassed myself, didn’t I?” she says.
“Not at all.”
“It doesn’t take you very long to get yourself to the finish line, does it?”
“Uh. No. It’s not what I’d call a long and arduous process.” I chuckle, and thank God, she laughs with me. I ask, “It takes you a while to get there?”
She’s blushing like a vine-ripened tomato. But she nods.
“There’s no reason to feel embarrassed,” I say. “I want you to feel like you can talk to me about anything.”
“I’ve never talked about this with anyone before.”
“No one? Not even Georgina?”
She shakes her head.
“Your mom?”
She snorts. “No.”
“Really? Growing up, my dad gave me a pretty detailed talk about sex and beating off. It was a little weird. But he meant well. And my best friends and I used to talk about beating off all the time as young teens.”
She shrugs. “Maybe most girls talk about this stuff with their friends, growing up. But I never did.” She chews on the inside of her cheek. “To be honest, I’ve only just started, you know, exploring myself fairly recently.”
“Well, then, it makes perfect sense it takes you a while to get to the finish line.”
“Sometimes, I don’t even get there. It takes so long, I just give up.”
“That’s because you’re still on the bunny slopes when it comes to this stuff. Don’t stress it. Speaking from my own experience, and everything my friends always talk about, women don’t have an on-off switch like men. They’re complicated. If you’re having trouble figuring yourself out, then join the club, dude.” When she smiles, I feel emboldened to continue. I say, “Come on. There are at least a million videos online teaching men how to give a woman an orgasm. And lots of it is paid content. You think there’d be a paid marketplace for that shit if it was an easy thing to do?”
She giggles and shakes her head.
“It’s tough, man! But do you think there’s a paid market for how to make a dude come? Nope. Because all you have to do is this.” I move my fist up and down like I’m jerking off, and she laughs and laughs. “Plus, you’ve never had a partner before. So, how the hell are you supposed to know what works for you? All the Morgan dudes are always going on and on about how they took their woman to new heights and blah blah. I’m sure you’ll start figuring things out way more quickly when you start experimenting with . . .” My chest tightens as I realize I